- 1 J.A. Cuddon, “Macaronic”, The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory, London, Pen (...)
- 2 T.V.F. Brogan and Ulrich K. Goldsmith, “Macaronic verse”, in Alex Preminger, T.V.F. Brogan, Frank J (...)
1Literary texts that combine different languages can be described by several terms: macaronic, multilingual, and translingual. Each of these terms has a slightly different meaning. While macaronic is primarily associated with the historically located practice of combining Latin with vernaculars, multilingual is a term used to describe a broader range of texts combining multiple languages. While with macaronics, the “intention […] is nearly always comic and/or nonsensical,”1 multilingual poetics combine languages for other reasons. Arguably, the perception of the macaronic method changed during modernism when it became “a serious and important technique of poetic composition, allusion, and structure.”2 Through the work of such writers as T.S. Eliot (1888–1965), Ezra Pound (1885–1972), James Joyce (1882–1941), and Eugene Jolas (1894–1952), the use of multiple languages in literature turned into a full-fledged literary device and surpassed the niche definition of macaronics.
- 3 Leonard Forster, The Poet’s Tongues: Multilingualism in Literature, New Zealand, London, New York, (...)
- 4 Jahan Ramazani, Poetry in a Global Age, Chicago, London, University of Chicago Press, 2020, p. 200.
2Some modernist authors took up another form of multilingual practice: writing in a language different from their mother tongue. This kind of literature is usually referred to as translingual. Although this practice existed before modernism, it was not until quite recently that the word translingualism was adopted by literary scholars. Writing on literary multilingualism before this term was introduced, Leonard Forster, for instance, uses the term “polyglot poets”3 to refer to authors who compose poetry in more than one language, a term that seems outdated from today’s perspective. The shift in terminology highlights a change in the perception of the multilingual author’s relation to their language(s). Translingual emphasises the transgression inherent in the act of changing a literary language. It also indicates a sense of fluidity associated with moving between linguistic environments (both cultural and social). In turn, multilingual refers to a fusion or contrast that emerges in the act of combining languages. While a multilingual text brings together various languages by creatively correlating their phonetic, morphological, semantic, orthographic, or calligraphic aspects, the fundamental concern of translingual writing is the oscillation between these systems. Using a metaphor from physics, one may argue that the translingual sensibility is similar to the wave-particle duality of quantum objects. A translingual text is always more than just a mechanical contrasting of different languages. Rather, it is an imprint of the movement between languages. If writing can be defined as a process of inscribing a continuum of signs in a medium, literary multilingualism largely involves the disruption of this continuum by means of code-switching. The translingual method in turn may be seen as the practice of code-stitching which, according to Jahan Ramazani, signals “poetry’s literariness, its bending back of reference onto itself, its insistence on the verbal materiality and sonic textures that resonate even across languages.”4
3In this article, the term translingual refers to texts that incorporate more than one language and that are written by authors whose biographies have been shaped by engagement with multiple languages. By prioritising the term translingual over multilingual, I aim to emphasise intralingual fluidity and mutability that accompanies the writer’s subjectivity as they craft texts at the intersections of different idioms.
- 5 Steven G. Kellman, Nimble Tongues: Studies in Literary Translingualism, West Lafayette, Purdue Univ (...)
- 6 Eugene Ostashevsky, “Translingualism: A Poetics of Language Mixing and Estrangement,” boundary 2, v (...)
4Steven G. Kellman argues that studying texts produced by translingual authors offers “rich material for understanding language, the imagination, and the experience of what it is to be human.”5 The translingual approach to multilingual literary phenomena, therefore, seeks to gain an insight into the relation between the writing subject and language from a new perspective. Eugene Ostashevsky, a scholar and translingual poet, has similarly proposed thinking of translingual poetics “as the poetics of linguistic estrangement which arises when the poet does not treat the language of writing as native and instead takes up the strategies of a language learner.”6 As a consequence,
translingual poetry aims to slow down and break up the speech flow. […] Words become stumbling blocks, dislocated from the language of communication, and dissociated from the speaker: things rather than signs. Their formal and material aspects are now foregrounded.7
5Ostashevsky’s argument, inspired by Russian formalism, highlights an important consequence of translingual literary practice. As the materiality of languages is contrasted in a translingual encounter, new meanings emerge – meanings that may transcend the purely linguistic domain. As the writer moves between languages and words become “things rather than signs”, linguistic signs begin to resemble visual symbols. Literary texts transform the way they operate in terms not merely of how they are read, but also of how they are seen. In other words, the translingual technique amplifies the multimodal dimensions of the text.
- 8 Carey Jewitt (ed.), The Routledge Handbook of Multimodal Analysis, London, New York, Routledge, 200 (...)
- 9 Ibid.
6The term multimodality “approaches representation, communication and interaction as something more than language,”8 referring to the idea that, in communication, “all modes, like speech and writing, consist of sets of semiotic resources”9 that shape the message and its meaning. In other words, multimodal studies propose that communication encompasses various types of resources, including linguistic and visual elements. This is where multimodal studies and translingual scholarship intersect.
- 10 Daisuke Kimura and Suresh Canagarajah, “Translingual practice and ELF”, in Jennifer Jenkins, Will B (...)
- 11 Ibid., p. 296.
7The translingual approach to language moves “beyond the notion of multilingualism as a collection of discrete language systems”,10 instead viewing communication as “involving mobile semiotic resources that can be put together for particular contexts, audiences, and purposes”.11 In this paradigm, linguistic boundaries are seen as ideological constructs, and the binary division between native and non-native speakers is dismissed. Like multimodal analysis, the translingual approach is based on an idea that communication draws on diverse semiotic resources represented by different linguistic systems. However, the communicative situation is not always smooth and devoid of interruptions. The concrete arrangement of languages in a text is important. In some texts the combination of multilingual parts is more disruptive and fragmentary than in others. What is important, however, is that the translingual approach emphasises the decentralised character of individual languages in a text’s linguistic configuration.
8Not every translingual text is multimodal. The multimodal potential of translingual writing reveals itself through the confluence of different languages, or by augmenting the meaning of one language through the meanings of another. In these moments, linguistic signs abandon the purely linguistic logic of textuality and overlap with the visual field where they function as pictorial elements. This correlation between translingualism and multimodality can be observed in the works of two historically and stylistically distinct authors: the American poet of Ukrainian origin Ilya Kaminsky (1977–) and the Soviet-era Russian writer Pavel Ulitin (1918–1986).
9Ilya Kaminsky is a translingual poet who moved from Odessa, Ukraine, to the United States at the age of 16, adopting English as his literary language. His most recent collection, Deaf Republic (2019), operates at the intersection of multiple genres and languages. While his poems are written primarily in English, Kaminsky incorporates elements of sign language, drawing on his own experience as a hard-of-hearing person.
- 12 Alternatively, the name of the novel is 4 Quarks for Mr. Marx, or in Russian Четыре кварка [Chetyri (...)
10Similarly, Pavel Ulitin, a Soviet-era Russian writer and language teacher, created intricate textual artefacts that blend Russian, English, and other languages with elements of graphic design and calligraphy. His posthumously published novel-like collection of texts Four Quarks12 (2018) exemplifies an approach to literature characterised by experimental typography, including diverse fonts, colours, and collage techniques.
11In my use of the term multimodal I follow Shuangyi Li, who has applied it in an analysis of multilingual works of francophone Chinese authors François Cheng (1929–) and Shan Sa (1972–). These authors are similar to Kaminsky and Ulitin in that they also emphasize the visual dimension of textuality by way of calligraphy. Analysing the visual aspect of their writing, Shuangyi Li differentiates intermediality from multimodality. According to him the latter,
- 13 Shuangyi Li, “(Sino)graphs in Franco(n)texts: The Multilingual and the Multimodal in Franco-Chinese (...)
describes the simultaneous engagement of more than one sense faculty in textual production, that is, referring ‘mode’ to semiotic forms (verbal, visual, etc.) while ‘media’ refers to material platforms (books, paintings, art installations, etc.).13
12The distinction between mode and medium is crucial in discussing Kaminsky and Ulitin. The book, as a material method of inscription, plays a central role in the construction of their literary work. The multimodal aspects of Kaminsky’s and Ulitin’s works are interwoven with the logic of linguistic expression and textuality. While the visual aspects of their writing suggest correlations with other media, such as theatre or painting, all meaning-making techniques remain contained within the materiality of the book. According to Lars Elleström, the physical modality of a medium (what Elleström calls its “latent corporeal interface”) plays a crucial role in the way it shapes its content:
- 14 Lars Elleström, “The Modalities of Media: A Model for Understanding Intermedial Relations”, in Lars (...)
The material interface of television programs and motion pictures, for instance, consists of a more or less flat surface of changing images (in a wide sense of the notion) combined with sound waves. The interface of most kinds of written text also consists of a flat surface, but the appearance of the surface is not changing. The interface of music and radio theatre consists of sound waves. Regular theatre, on the other hand, must be understood as a combination of several interfaces: sound waves, surfaces that are both flat and not flat and that have both a changing and static character, and also the very specific corporeal interface of human bodies. The interface of sculptures normally consists of extended, generally solid materiality.14
13Unlike theatre, which relies on sound and physical movement, or digital poetry, which combines an interactive, changeable digital interface with text, Kaminsky’s and Ulitin’s works rely on the flat surface of a page. However, within this medium their work is inscribed in a way that shifts towards a mode of visual reception. Arguably, more attention is paid to visual elements than in standard writing, where the primary mode of engagement with the text is through reading. As Elleström argues, reading a text
often involves the creation and recollections of visual experiences that are very remote from the way the alphabetic letters look, and it also involves an inner hearing of the sounds of the words. New sensations are thus frequently a complex web of perceived and conceived sense-data combined with retrieved sensations.15
14In Kaminsky’s and Ulitin’s works, the visual experience of reading is closely connected to the appearance of the alphabetic letters. More specifically, the continuum of linguistic signs is expanded and transcended in two ways: first, through a multilingual mixing that highlights orthographic and visual similarities between different languages; and second, in a multimodal field, by incorporating visual elements beyond standard writing techniques, such as images of gestures, uniquely formatted block quotations, and calligraphic insertions, into the flow of the text.
15The interconnection of translingual and multimodal sensibilities in Kaminsky’s and Ulitin’s writing highlights a sense of synaesthetic overlapping that is inherent to the notion of writing in general. Historically, the multimodality of writing has been described with two major tropes: sonic and visual. As W.J.T. Mitchell writes:
- 16 W.J.T. Mitchell, Picture Theory: Essays on Visual Representation, Chicago, London, University of Ch (...)
The history of writing is regularly told as a story of progress from primitive picture-writing and gestural sign language to hieroglyphics to alphabetic writing “proper.” Writing thus is the medium in which the interaction of image and text, pictorial and verbal expression, adumbrated in the tropes of ut pictura poesis and the “sisterhood” of the arts, seems to be a literal possibility. […] If writing is the medium of absence and artifice, the image is the medium of presence and nature, sometimes cozening us with illusion, sometimes with powerful recollection and sensory immediacy. Writing is caught between two othernesses, voice and vision, the speaking and the seeing subject.16
- 17 T.V.F. Brogan, “Poetry,” in Alex Preminger, T.V.F. Brogan, Frank J. Warnke, O.B. Hardison and Earl (...)
16Poetry, in particular, is an art situated between the synthetic duality of senses. A poem is an aesthetic object that exists in a doubled simultaneity. It is, on the one hand, an instance of speech strategically organised and refined, and on the other, language made visible in writing. It is because of this duality that “of all the arts, […] poetry may well seem the most schizophrenic.”17 Arguably, most of literature is consumed today in a written form, even though poetry started as an oral art. When we speak of texts exhibiting marks of literariness, this has primarily to do with written artefacts. However, there is something fundamentally multimodal in the deployment of literariness that cannot be disentangled from its synaesthetic extensions. To say that literariness is an effect limited to language is to overlook other cognitive phenomena that play an important role in language usage and textual production – phenomena that become especially apparent under the conditions of multilingual mixing.
17The translingual nature of Kaminsky’s work is evident both in the details of his biography and the artistic choices made in his poems. His first collection Dancing in Odessa (2004) contains numerous references to modernist authors, such as Paul Celan (1920–1970) and Osip Mandelstam (1891–1938), as well as descriptions of Kaminsky’s hometown Odessa. In this way, the book engages in a continuous dialogue with non-Anglophone cultural traditions. However, it is in Kaminsky’s second collection, Deaf Republic (2019), that his translingual poetics fully develops in a multimodal register. Here, his poems combine English with signed words that are reproduced as images.
- 18 Kaminsky’s choice to include the puppet show as a motif is significant. A puppet is a vehicle of si (...)
18Deaf Republic is a collection of lyrical poems that together tell the story of Vasenka, a fictional city occupied by a military force. Following the occupation, the soldiers kill a deaf boy named Petya during a puppet show18 that takes place at the central square despite the prohibition of public gatherings. Stricken by this horrible act, the townspeople decide to feign deafness in protest, and learn to speak a sign language – this constitutes the main story line of the collection. Texts in Deaf Republic are part lyrical, part narrative, and part visual, bookended by two poems (“We Lived Happily during the War” and “In a Time of Peace”) which fall out of the fictional setting of the collection to situate Deaf Republic in the contemporary context.
- 19 Doris Mironescu, “Poetry, Disability and Metamodernism: Ilya Kaminsky’s Deaf Republic”, World and T (...)
- 20 Rachel Sutton-Spence and Ronice Müller de Quadros, “‘I Am The Book’ – Deaf Poets’ Views on Signed P (...)
- 21 Heidi M. Rose, “The Poet in the Poem in the Performance: The Relation of Body, Self, and Text in AS (...)
19Multimodality in Deaf Republic is not limited to the use of sign language. The collection is structured like a play, which highlights its potential performative realisation. It includes such characteristic elements of a dramatic text as a list of dramatis personae and division into acts. (The collection has been presented in the form of a play reading by the National Theater of Craiova in Romania.19) The dramatic logic highlights the capacity of a lyrical monologue not merely to be read aloud, but also to be seen, i.e. staged. It is possible to imagine a silent performance where speech is replaced by signs generated by the medium of the performer’s body. This dialectic plays a crucial role in sign language poetry. As the deaf poet Paul Scott has described it, “for deaf people, I am the book,”20 implying that the poetic text unfolds itself through his body. In turn, Heidi M. Rose has stated that sign language literature is “more than a literature of the body; it is a literature of performance, a literature that moves through time and space, embodied in the author’s physical presence.”21 While traditional theatre relies on the use of phonetic language as much as on the movement of the actors’ bodies, it nevertheless shares a similarity with sign language poetry in its reliance on the visual field for artistic effect. This emphasis on visuality is central to Deaf Republic, where Kaminsky combines English phonetic writing with sign language to create a poetics of multilingual expression. However, the poems in the collection never fully depart from the domain of textuality. Their performative potential enhances their visual modality, yet each poem remains a complete and self-contained aesthetic object without requiring any theatrical staging. In other words, this potential for theatrical staging serves as an additional dimension of the visual-textual poetics, rather than a necessary condition for the poems’ realisation.
- 22 Ilya Kaminsky, Deaf Republic, London, Minneapolis, Faber & Faber, 2019, p. 11.
- 23 Ibid., p. 72.
20Theatre also appears in Deaf Republic as a motif, thematising the relations between the characters (as suggested by the opening line of the first poem, “our country is the stage”22), and as a structural feature that shapes the relations between the poems and the reader/viewer. The last (untitled) text of the second act of Deaf Republic portrays the uprising of the people of Vasenka as if it were being acted out on a stage in front of an audience: “We’re sitting in the audience, still. Silence, like the bullet that’s missed us, spins”.23 This is followed by a poem written in sign language (see figure 1). While signs regularly appear throughout the whole collection, they are presented here without any accompanying English translation.
Fig. 1. A poem from Ilya Kaminsky’s Deaf Republic.24
21In Deaf Republic, the use of sign language and overarching theatrical logic of the collection will draw our attention to the semiotics of visual representation. However, the visuality of signs is to a certain extent governed by the logic of translingualism. Individual signs in the collection belong to different sign languages. As Kaminsky explains in a note to the text:
In Vasenka, the townspeople invented their own sign language. Some of the signs derived from various traditions (Russian, Ukrainian, Belarusian, American Sign Language, etc.). Other signs might have been made up by citizens, as they tried to create a language not known to authorities.25
22Sign languages differ from one another by virtue of the same signification principles that distinguish signs of phonetic languages. As Jennifer L. Nelson points out in her discussion of non-phonetic writing in relation to Jacques Derrida’s critique of phonocentrism, signed words acquire meaning through the mechanisms of arbitrariness and difference:
- 26 Jennifer L. Nelson, “Textual Bodies, Bodily Texts”, in H-Dirksen L. Bauman, Jennifer L. Nelson and (...)
there is something common to spoken words, written words, and signed words that binds them all together: the fact that they signify something and stand in for something else, and mean something because they are sunk within a network of differing signifiers.26
23If phonetic writing fixes sound in letters, gestural writing captures movement as images. Both signification techniques align with the concept of a linguistic sign, but the gesture, when it is reproduced in writing, is also somewhat akin to an image. This resemblance becomes even more pronounced when pictorial representations of signed words are contrasted with phonetic writing.
- 27 Raymond Antrobus, “Deaf Republic by Ilya Kaminsky Review: How to Defy a Dictatorship without Saying (...)
24When the material and formal aspects of words are foregrounded, they appear more as visual symbols than as linguistic signs. Placed next to phonetic words, the signed words are defamiliarised from their linguistic function, and their pictorial aspect is highlighted. As someone who does not speak any sign language and has never experienced deafness, I perceive the signed words in Deaf Republic as a homogenised continuum of pictorial representations, within which I am unable to discern the boundaries of distinct linguistic systems. I look at these signs more as images than linguistic units. This experience would be different for someone fluent in sign language – the British poet Raymond Antrobus, for example, who (in his review of Kaminsky’s book) notes the multilingual logic of signs and his own inability to recognise every word.27
- 28 Erika Raniolo, “Translating Poetry in Sign Language: An Embodied Perspective”, Frontiers in Communi (...)
25Some signs in Deaf Republic have a more prominent mimetic function than others, as with the sign word for town (figure 2) used several times throughout the collection. It consists of two palms put together, which looks like the roof of a house. One of the theoretical models for the production of meaning in sign languages is based on the idea that signing is iconic: signs possess a similar capacity to say and to show.28 The sign for town is evidently iconic, resembling a roof, which refers metonymically to house, which, in turn, refers metonymically to town. The gesture in this context operates multimodally as a linguistic sign and pictorial symbol.
- 29 Ilya Kaminsky, op. cit., p. 14.
Fig. 2. A signed word from Ilya Kaminsky’s Deaf Republic.29
26The semiotic nature of individual signs in Deaf Republic shifts depending on the context. As the revolt of the people of Vasenka continues, signs are sometimes depicted as literal representations of the gestures the Vasenka people use to communicate with one another. In this context, the semiotic character of signs is more indexical than iconic. As tools of communication, signs partially represent the things they describe. However, when they function as pictorial windows into the fictional world, they illustrate the situations in which the signs are used, pointing to them as an index. In this way, each sign operates as both linguistic sign and representation. As a word, it is incorporated into the fabric of the text, but as a picture it illustrates the text. This duality is where the theatrical potential of the play becomes particularly significant.
27The complementarity dynamic between signed and phonetic words extends to larger formal arrangements of language. As phonetic writing takes shape, new meanings emerge when the formal structures of phonetic sentences are contrasted with signed words. A good example of this process is the poem “Theater Nights”:
Fig. 3. A poem from Ilya Kaminsky’s Deaf Republic.30
28Significantly, the phonetic lines of the poem are not divided into stanzas. The second and third lines are positioned slightly to the right. They are still part of the main body of the text, but as these lines stick out, their bristling irregularity is reminiscent of the way the five fingers and palm, the sign word for match (figure 3), spread out. Just as each line sticks out slightly in different directions while still being part of the larger block of text, each of the fingers in the gesture has its own space while still belonging to a single hand. The visual form of the phonetic part of the poem resembles the signed word, which constitutes a second stanza. Semiotically, the form of the poem (that part of it that is written in phonetic English) relies on a similar iconicity, insofar as it does not merely organise the linguistic material, but also functions as a system of visual signs.
29If, in the tradition of phonetic literature, the poet is metaphorically imagined as the one who sings, in non-phonetic literature this figure is the one who signs. In Kaminsky’s Deaf Republic the translingual logic correlates with multimodality as writing oscillates between different types of semiotic relations, arbitrariness and resemblance, telling and showing.
30An example of Pavel Ulitin’s writing may be helpful before proceeding to discuss his work. The following pages come from Ulitin’s collage book, in which he uses a variety of formal techniques, from calligraphy to typewriting, in English and Russian, as well as integrating pictures and newspaper clippings into the flow of handwritten text (also featuring French and Russian):
- 31 Pavel Ulitin, Kak on Derzhit Veslo?, Russkaja Virtual’naja Biblioteka, online, 2024, p. 78-79, cons (...)
Fig. 4. Pages 78–79 from the collage book Kak on Derzhit Veslo.31
Fig. 5. Pages 68–69 from the collage book Kak on Derzhit Veslo.32
31Ulitin’s writing can be situated within the broad domain of experimental literature, and more particularly in concrete poetry and similar traditions. However, the most striking aspect of Ulitin’s technique consists not merely in its visual mode but in the interplay between visuality and multilingualism. The discussion of Kaminsky’s Deaf Republic above will help us elucidate this relation. I have argued that in Kaminsky’s collection, signed words have the dual nature of linguistic units and images. We find a similar correlation in Ulitin’s writing between multilingualism and multimodality, though to different effect. In Deaf Republic, signed and phonetic words are complementary, mutually affecting each other. In some cases phonetic writing adopts the semiotic techniques of gestural signification. Similarly, in Ulitin’s work, the combination of different languages in an intense spatial polemics tends to exceed their linguistic logic and adopt the function of visual formations. This relationship between languages is aptly characterised by W.J.T. Mitchell’s notion of contrapuntal bilingualism, which refers to
- 33 W.J.T. Mitchell, “Preface: Utopian Gestures”, in H-Dirksen L. Bauman, Jennifer L. Nelson and Heidi (...)
a bilingual performance in which speech and gesture [have] a contrapuntal or even contradictory, ironic relationship. In written language, we see this most literally in the way a “block” quotation serves to “block” the reader’s progress, framing off a string of words as a detour, a change of speaker.33
32I would like to use Mitchell’s comparison of the block quotation with a gesture in a speech-based performance to interpret Ulitin’s poetics as one based on the technique of multilingual gesturing. In this technique, the gesture corresponds to a block of text that introduces a new language into the linguistic configuration, disrupting the monolingual flow and drawing attention to itself. In Ulitin’s writing, such blocks of multilingual insertions are often visually distinct, separated from each other by spacing or other formatting techniques. These paragraphs are not merely formal containers of words, but – by virtue of their individual shapes – function as signs with a distinct visual identity.
- 34 Maria Mushtrieva, Montage Figures in Pavel Ulitin’s Writing: Voices, Fishes and Rubber Cement, Berl (...)
33Arguing against this theoretical distinction, it is possible to say that Ulitin’s technique can be grasped through the notion of montage,34 a metaphor for Ulitin’s writing in its fundamental aim to combine heterogeneous visual and linguistic elements in a single discursive space. However, precisely because the term montage is borrowed from the study of cinema, it falls short of capturing the kind of translingualism that is at work in Ulitin’s text. Whereas montage refers to the movement of images on a flat surface, Ulitin’s works involve the assemblage of different fragments “glued together” to produce a spatiotemporal unity, so that the logic that unites them is as visual as it is translingual. The movement from one passage to another in Ulitin’s text does not merely entail a perceptual change in visual data but also a linguistic shift, opening up intertextual and interlinguistic relations. The multimodal character of this process goes hand in hand with its translingual intention.
34Individual multilingual passages are often introduced as separate blocks of texts, however sometimes this multilingual mixing occurs at the level of sentences. As multilingual pieces move away from each other on the page, they acquire the appearance of a gesture whose aim is both to organise linguistic material and visually fracture or distort its flow. An excerpt from Ulitin’s Four Quarks illustrates how the logic of the block quote visually affects the composition of the text:
- 35 Pavel Ulitin,“Chetyri kvarka” i drugie teksty, ed. M. Aizenberg, Moscow, Novoe Literaturnoe Obozren (...)
Fig. 6. NLO’s book edition of Ulitin’s manuscript.35
35Like most of Ulitin’s work, Four Quarks is a manually crafted book combining typewritten text with handwritten insertions affected by multiple formatting techniques. The publishers of Ulitin’s manuscript faced significant challenges in rendering the semiotically complex arrangement of Four Quarks into a book format. For instance, they had to distinguish the handwritten sections by highlighting them in italics. However, even stripped of certain semantic layers, Ulitin’s text continues to rely on the logic of multilingual gesturing that highlights its visual aspect. In the quote above, the formatting of individual lines, the spacing between the words and passages, the division between multilingual parts of the text all contribute to the production of meaning. The text acquires a sense of tangible multidimensionality, as it shifts from its status as a container of words to that of an arrangement of visual objects.
36We may even be compelled to ask whether the primary source of meaning in this text really lies in its linguistic dimension. The complexity of intertextual relations potentially contained in Four Quarks is so immense that an act of interpretation can become virtually impossible. Some references are pointed out by the author himself (as in the novel A Local Habitation by Jack Linsday). Other references can be deduced based on commentary and general erudition. For example, the French phrase “le pouvoir plus l’électricité” is a quote from Lenin’s writings which says that “communism is Soviet power plus electricity.”36 Why is the quote translated into French? One possible explanation is the intention, through this transposition of the communist leader’s words into another language, to produce an ironic effect. However, the inclusion of a spatially estranged line in a foreign language is also a visual fact of the text’s formal poetics. Does it have a similar ironic effect? The question that this interplay of multimodality and multilingualism ultimately raises is whether the techniques for producing meaning in the (conventionally) semiotic dimension of linguistic signs correspond to those in the visual field, where the same signs may function less in terms of a language and more like pictorial art. When viewed as a gesture, the multilingual insertions need not correspond directly to the linguistic logic, while still not abandoning completely the signifying operations of language.
37To comprehend a text means to turn it into an intellectual object with finite boundaries, literally to grasp it. A plot, as a semiotic structure, can be extracted from a story-based text, such as a novel, through the gradual progression of reading it. An acquired story can be retold. These laws, however, do not apply to Ulitin’s writing. The process of reading his text will not enable one to condense the vast volume of textual material into a concise summary. Ulitin’s work cannot be retold, but it can be (re)lived much like how an abstract painting – by being looked at – can be taken in by the viewer as a cognitive experience. Ulitin’s writing makes most sense when it is conceived from a certain cognitive distance, which allows to comprehend it in its totality.
38Reading Ulitin’s texts can be compared to looking at an abstract painting. It resists being understood in the conventional sense of the word. Similar to how an abstract painting is seen as a whole, Ulitin’s text makes an impression in its simultaneous entirety. The unfolding of textual-visual poetics of Ulitin’s work resembles the processes of visual structuring described by Rudolf Arnheim when one looks at a painting:
- 37 Rudolf Arnheim, “A Plea for Visual Thinking”, in W.J.T. Mitchell (ed.), The Language of Images, Chi (...)
The process of structuring, in which each element receives its character in the whole, occurs to some extent below the level of consciousness. What the viewer “sees” in the picture is already the outcome of that organizational process. Only when someone struggles to discover the order of a complicated composition does he experience within himself something of the shaping process in search of the final image.37
39The pictorial aspects of Ulitin’s work can be seen as a form of communication practice known to anyone who has spoken a foreign language (especially one that they are not very familiar with). In such situations, it is not uncommon to assist oneself, consciously or unconsciously, with hand gestures or other types of bodily movement, trying to express a thought that seems to be so easily articulated in the speaker’s mind and yet cannot be expressed because the right word is not near at hand. In this case, physical gesturing can be seen as a supplementary communication technique aiming to support the linguistic channel.
40I propose that, from a certain perspective, the multimodal aspects of Kaminsky and Ulitin’s work can be seen as a textual analogy of this kind of bodily gesturing. Just as a speaker of a foreign language might instinctively supplement with physical gestures to express a thought, the multilingual texts of Kaminsky and Ulitin extend signification techniques beyond language, engaging other modes of communication. This multimodal gesturing is not merely a mechanical combination of discrete languages. Rather, it is an attempt to find ground in new semiotic resources in a translingual search for the correct expression. It reflects the incompleteness of linguistic communication itself. Such incompleteness becomes especially apparent in a context where multiple languages converge.
41There are not many similarities between Ilya Kaminsky and Pavel Ulitin. They differ in terms of their backgrounds, literary method, style, and historical epochs. One of the few things that unites the two writers is that they both speak more than one language, which leaves an imprint on their work. However, it is precisely because the differences between Kaminsky and Ulitin are so prevalent that a comparison of their work is productive. Since these writers are not united by a local or immediate relation – they were not members of a single literary movement, for example – their oeuvre can exemplify similar universal processes at work in a multilingual text.
- 38 Juliana Spahr, “Multilingualism in Contemporary American Poetry”, in Alfred Bendixen and Stephen Bu (...)
42Identifying general tendencies in artefacts of literary multilingualism is crucial for understanding the location of multilingual writing in literary history. Since the multilingual practice regained significance during modernism it may be natural to think of any new, contemporary texts employing translingual techniques as a continuation of the modernist tradition. However, modernism is not always the primary point of reference. Many examples of multilingual writing have different affiliations. As Juliana Spahr suggests in her discussion of the American poet Rosmarie Waldrop, the seemingly modernist character of a multilingual text may be just a tangential effect of the translingual method, which does not necessarily position the text in question in relation to modernism. Looking at Waldrop’s work A Key into the Language of America, Spahr writes that “rather than relying, as many North American ‘experimental’ works do, on modernist forms such as repetition or fragmentation or parataxis to disrupt the conventional syntaxes of English, [Waldrop] includes an indigenous and local language.”38 Spahr suggests that some multilingual US poets
might be part of not minority traditions but rather a significant political-aesthetic formation of U.S. literature, if considered together as the emergence of a literature in English that includes other languages. It would be easy to place these somewhat messy, big, book-length projects in the tradition of modernism. But to consider them only as modernist risks overlooking the complicated relation of this poetry to U.S. identity categories and to specific sociopolitical histories.39
43Kaminsky and Ulitin were certainly acquainted with the modernist tradition as numerous references in their works indicate. Yet I would suggest that their writing represents a new development in this context. While translingual literary practice has been reintroduced in modernism, the increasingly complex, global, and interconnected nature of the contemporary world has made this practice more widespread. For many modernist experimental writers, breaking the boundaries of language and experimenting was a key goal. In contrast, contemporary translingual writing is more concerned with how subjectivity navigates flows of signs derived from diverse semiotic resources.
- 40 Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory, London, Penguin Books, 2000, p. 17.
44Of course, the question remains whether the correlation between translingualism and multimodality is receptive to a systematic explanation through cognitive science, and whether that correlation can be identified across a larger body of texts. There may be a similarity between translingualism and altered modes of perception. Vladimir Nabokov, for example, had synaesthesia, which he describes in his memoirs Speak, Memory as “colored hearing.”40 Many translingual writers report that speaking in a new language feels like inhabiting a new personality. If adopting a new language can transform one’s sense of self, perhaps it might also alter how one processes and perceives information.